Diablo 3 pets will be slightly buffed to reflect player statistics

Responding to complaints that Diablo 3 pets are underpowered against Rift Guardians and other powerful foes, a spokesperson for Blizzard has confirmed the studio will buff the companions. Game designer John Yang has taken to the Battle.net forums to confirm the changes, providing some insight into how Blizzard expects pets to scale with the player character.

Overall, Yang explains that pets should “be roughly as survivable as the player”. This means pets are designed to scale with survivability stats and derive their toughness from player's stats, while not becoming virtually untouchable tanks.

“To work towards the first goal, Pets should take reduced damage based on how avoidable the monster attack normally is for a player,” Yang wrote. “This is done instead of giving pets AI to run away from damaging attacks, which would cause them to lose out on DPS time."

Yang listed the three categories of monster attacks and how they will affect the pet. These include 'Full damage to pet', 'reduced damage to pet' and 'drastically reduced damage to pets'. The full rundown can be read in this t hread on Battle.net (scroll down until you find the blue text).